[©? you decide.]
Early on the morning of May 11, I woke from a dream in which I had written
a full review of an exhibition at a gallery in Atlanta. I was delighted that I
had done the basic work of composing one of the many reviews that I still have
to write, until I realized I had written about an exhibition that didn’t exist.
This is what I wrote in the dream, more or less, as best I
can reconstruct it. The review is plausible because M.M. (spelled out in the
review in the dream) is a large multi-gallery space that houses several
independent exhibitions at the same time.
“Unwitting Underground,” at M.M., is a Buddhist-themed exhibition in
one of the space’s several galleries that consists of works made from the
materials left after the creation of the artworks in the other galleries.
Assemblages, not all of them imitative of Sarah Sze’s approach to the problem,
contain used-up tubes of paint, marble and granite chips from sculptures, trays
of unsuitable found objects, and so forth. (Some viewers may be reminded of the
recent show of Thornton Dial works that included wall pieces made from all the
detritus he recovered from the studio floor, or of Howard Finster’s “I took the
pieces you threw away....”) The work by the anonymous Buddhist artists who
created the show incorporated as well all the inventory sheets, scraps of
hanging wire, pizza boxes, etc.
discarded by the gallery staff during the installation of the other
exhibitions.
One wall piece is a sort of webbed holster in which objects needed for
the ongoing creation of art can be put on display long enough to be
photographed for inclusion in the exhibition. I installed my cane, with which I
hobble around to write these reviews, until the documentation was completed.
I suppose I should have waited until I finished writing, but of course
then the cane would not have been part of the exhibition about which I had
written.
—Jerry Cullum, May 11, 2013
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